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While fundamental social change in the United States and in the world will no doubt be accompanied by a violence running counter to the violence of the established system—for in biological terms, one is EITHER alive OR dead—any possible change will be no change at all unless the pitfall of identity and opposition can be overcome. The double-binding oscillations which this relation of projection and identification sets up must eventually be transcended in the real and material relationships of man-and-womankind by the mediation of Symbolic DIFFERENCE.

…As intensely conscious as one may be of the fact that ideas alone can change nothing, one has nevertheless to begin somewhere. There is only one escape from the dilemmas of opposition and identity, and it makes no difference whether one is talking in epistemological, ideological, or political terms. If dissent is to escape its own self-alienation, if it is to escape the automatic response of liberalism, that ‘all ideas are equal’ or that a new theory is simple ‘an interesting new point of view’, then dissent must transcend the status of negative identification. In a word, ALL DISSENT MUST BE OF A HIGHER LOGICAL TYPE THAN THAT TO WHICH IT IS OPPOSED. It will thus not make the Hegelian error of trying to reduce real and material differences to identity, for this is to be caught in an endless jeu de miroirs from which there is simply no escape.

…In open systems, the position of higher logical type is simply that which is most capable of dealing with the most context, and that which is most capable of understanding how methodological closures—like that of logical typing itself—inevitably generate paradox. In addition, therefore, to the traditional logical position dependent on laws of non-contradiction and identity (the analytic epistemology) WHICH WILL WORK INSIDE THE SYSTEM ONE HAS ISOLATED, there is a purely epistemological requirement for a logic of a higher logical type, subsuming the first, WHICH WILL WORK WHEN ONE TRIES TO CROSS THE SPATIAL, COMMUNICATIONAL, OR TEMPORAL BOUNDARIES SET UP BY CLOSURE. Such a logic will subsume the Gödelian paradoxes of analytical logic by a process of METACOMMUNICATION…

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About Ted Coffey Home

I’m a composer, musician, intermedia artist, and teacher in the McIntire Dept. of Music at the University of Virginia. Please check out this site to see more of what I do . . . . . . visit my youtube channel here . . . . . . visit my soundcloud page here . . […]more →